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Thursday, December 17, 2015

Leaden Feathers Painted White

Comedians round out the areas missed by rule of reason and law, wherein these areas are subject to the rule that human tragedy is better considered a result of ignorance, incompetence, or some other reason which falls short of real malice in the responsible agent. It is to remediate tragedy, but this by some means so as to rightly demand responsibility in viewing the matter truthfully, so as to avoid such unnecessary and unwanted evil in the future. It is like confessing the worst so that we may then get past it by facing it properly and trying to deal with it responsibly from then on. It is in the energy of tension that this releases, in the way that it rounds out the injustices of the human condition by making them something people can openly address without bullshitting themselves or each other. If it really accomplishes this task, then that tension is released and things change everywhere that has influence, and people smile and laugh. But this has a dark side in that it may be inflated in its impact, and be a papier mache version of the real thing in some universes. I say that in this universe it precisely is this according to all evidence.

Some main grief about comedians is their tendency to get certain things completely wrong, but drag laughs out of the public. So in this act Bill Burr decides it's cute to become a little miniature Bill Gates on the issue of "overpopulation". It's just like listening to Bill Gates coated with an outer layer of hard-nosed stand up comic routine. And then he leaves politics alone and gets honest about what he knows and becomes relevant again (as soon as the Bill Gates bit is over). But it never exceeds the boundaries of pointing up human stupidity and underplaying the element of malice just enough as not to alienate the audience. It will never exceed that boundary, never again like it did with George Carlin. These shock comics are not very shocking nor about issues as substantive, albeit sometimes, as with his bit about Hillary and "someone wearing a goat head".

Same with female on male violence, same with misidentified "pedophilia", which is nothing more than the same fraternal affection any man feels for his own children. And yes, society is hideous in its deformity of values in these areas, and so yields the manifestation of an absurd cultural distortion of what constitutes sanity on those and other subjects where the facts completely contradict the common attitude or perspective, often both. There is a lot of important dystopic dissonance that he brings up in his work, and some of it has even novel psychological, scientific interest in that it can be quantified and generalized upon even by simple thought experiment. He might touch on some such issues in the form of questioning people's rationale for justifying female violence in their reactions to his jokes, and yet showing a contrary attitude when the same violence is perpetrated by him at random people for arbitrary reasons. This disproportion is shown as prima facie evidence of a fundamental absurdity in the human condition. He could go very deep into that topic just by saying the absurdity out loud as a suggestion.

Another example is when he insists that a straight man's revulsion at seeing a male homosexual act is unjustly stigmatized because it is both natural and non-malicious. He made allowance for context and manner, but that still just made his case. So he goes into another comfort zone of the masses and just takes another justified jab at social ignorance and hypocrisy. At the same time this issue really goes beyond his statement of it, as it is the case that in fact that heterosexual revulsion with homosexual activity is always stronger in nature than homosexual revulsion with heterosexual activity.

The truth is, a properly speaking heterosexual male is revolted by both parties of the homosexual male couple's sexual activities. It is simply a natural revulsion, which is inverse to their attraction to their proper sexual object. It is almost as if this has to be explained. So this revulsion, which is naturally stronger in the heterosexual when viewing a homosexual act, HAS TO BE THIS WAY because he cannot identify with either member of the activity, and yet the are both male (using the male example, as it may be asymmetrical across the sexes, although still polarized in the same general way). But if either a homosexual person or heterosexual person witnesses a HETEROSEXUAL act, then the heterosexual must still "edit out" the male in order or else distance himself from that (unless he's a pervert or perhaps the PDA police). Ruling out that, a person, in this case a heterosexual male, would prefer not to stare at this scene. He might even prefer to see two women kissing if they both might like his company. I think most heterosexual males would prefer to see that to a man and woman going at it. In the contrary case, it is like saying they prefer to see a naked man's body rather than two naked women's bodies, which is absurd.

The point is that in this regard, while the heterosexual male will have a distinct revulsion at the heterosexual couple's sexual activity (but only because the man must be displaced with effort in the mind which is contrary to the facts witnessed and so creates dissonance in him, even though he naturally identifies with the male's position: these complement one another synergistically). But when the homosexual male sees a heterosexual act, it is not a serious challenge for the homosexual male to "edit out" the female, because as a gay male he cannot seriously identify with her, but in the same situation the heterosexual male can more easily identify with his own "body double" and exercise an Oedipal fantasy through the act. He may fantasize taking the other man out of the equation and replacing him, literally. That can be subconscious, but it can underscore the whole tone of how he perceives an open heterosexual PDA. But the only physical way that a homosexual male could put himself in that relationship is to change his sexual orientation to replace the man, or else to fake doing so to fool the woman, and there is no sexual reason for him to do either. But there is a ready-made reason for the heterosexual male to place himself in the scene. But the homosexual male can only do so by changing his body's physical gender.

So this is more revolting for a gay man to contemplate (especially if body-proud) than it is revolting for a heterosexual male to have his Oedipal fantasies arbitrarily dredged up in his subconscious while he's trying to eat lunch, and for any other number of reasons. It is more revolting to the gay man, but it is still somewhat revolting to the straight man. But the degree of revoltingness to the gay man is not at all like the homosexual scene is for the straight man who happens to see it, and so the strong asymmetry. This is true in spite of the also unfortunate fact that men are taught that perversion is cool and masculine so many will act like this scene is all good for them, the same way the pickle their own brains with alcohol for decades. Out of sheer stupidity, nothing to do with being a man. So unless he has that perverted persona, he might often NOT want to have that displayed to him while hes having a meal. Perhaps he just finds it a distasteful behavior to display even at Denny's, which is like the Jerry Springer of places to eat food. But the revulsion is there in any event, and yet it doesn't require him to change his physical gender in order to see himself in there somehow.

So we see both straight and gay males have "decency revulsion" at their type of sexual displays in public, straight males have only sexual object revulsion, but more than double that which a gay man has looking at a straight interaction, plus it is indecent at the venue perhaps. But the homosexual male can place himself in as the female counterpart of the male by removing her from the relationship and pretending the straight man is gay. There is no similar recourse to the straight man seeing two men kiss, regardless of either one's sexuality.

That's why we seeing two men kissing is so obscene for straight males, as it is impossible even in la la land to place ourselves anywhere near that situation, and why it is not a fair comparison to speak of what revulsion gay men may experience when viewing heterosexual activity. They naturally experience less in that sexuality is physical, and the sexuality of the object can be projected in the subconscious fantasy, and so there may be compensatory activity to offset the revulsion in his case. But again, not so for the straight male in the complementary scenario involving two men, EVEN WHEN THEY ARE STRAIGHT MEN, as depicted in various scenarios where it is an expression of some noble sentiment, some form of insanity, or even just an alien getting confused about human rituals. It is still always revolting. There is no earthly solution but to be extremely, naturally revolted. So it's worse than Bill Burr expresses it, and he's nice about this issue because it is a sort of strange asymmetry that could be interpreted, and is so interpreted by some, as being not in favor of homosexuality as a natural psychological condition, biologically in many ways. So this is clearly a "limit" in what he can broach, or else he might.

It is not even a big point in itself, but rather it shows there is a fuller truth that he cannot bring out as it would be "too much" for the audience to be something he can make funny at this stage. The truth is too absurd for comedy, and yet that is exactly the content that needs to brought to people's attention. That is where philosophers SHOULD have stepped in from their Ivory Towers and realized the Truth and expressed it but largely did not, although nowhere else in the totality of the fabric of human existence did there appear anyone who did this except for the philosopher. You can bet that the people in the American Philosphical Association are no better of a crowd among whom to pander blatant truths without vetting oneself as a brother in the cult of full-time truth obfuscation as an intellectual gatekeeper against people realizing the Truth. But since that's the case, there is nothing genuinely "philosphic" about that crowd, and I'm not going to care one whit for their attention, as it has no relevance to these matters about which they are so unqualified to discuss but rather have a lot for which to answer in their conduct.

So a good thing about his comedy is that he pushes in the direction of settling issues in favor of reality that society would, in its aberrant role of "ruling mob", prefer to keep ambiguous or hidden, as long as it doesn't have to face an unpleasant sense of its own fragile condition, getting nearer a breaking point as chemical, propagandistic, economic, social and psychological, even psychotronic warfare is being conducted against them should they vary from script, and scapegoats in all this villainy are veritably drafted from the pool of those who see through this facade and thoroughly refute it, ethically, morally, and spiritually. They don't like it when they're shown for what they truly are. And that is the minimum that we can say. Just as what people are prepared to listen to from the audience is a factor in how far Bill Burr will go with his material, and by extension even what he may consider or realize even apart from seeking material, so there are people who are listening in smaller audience who prefer to use the aforementioned "grid" of methodologies, and they will use pressures and coercion of their own, just ask certain popular yet estranged or dead comedians.

It stands as a case in determining with some sense of empirical and logical evidence what are the demonstrable boundary lines in popular consciousness, as well as in those who somehow pander to those limits to make a living. These boundary lines indicate with objective and quantifiable as well as subjective and qualified facts of experience by which to be assessed on all scales and hence given a metaphysically significant evaluation. Bill Burr is not yet making the sort of headway that a George Carlin made, albeit mostly in his very last years of a long career... It is not telling well for the world's future when this is the best it can do to make fun of its own absurdity, as this barely scratches the surface. It has to go way deeper than these issues to hit paydirt. But as he says in his interviews, in his own words as I paraphrase them, "as soon as you start to talk about stuff like 9-11 or the Patriot Act, people start looking at you like you're crazy". And he feels this way as a comedian who thrives on making looking crazy work for his act.

When wisdom does not guide members of the community at large, they then fall prey as fools to those who merely wear the robes of wisdom, but simply wish to run a scam on the public. Philosophers become curators of a dead language, whether or not they act with discipline upon their own ethical proclamations, and vain sophomoric sadistic cowards lead the population into absolute corruption and inevitable glorification of their flesh and and soul's subjection to every tyranny and debasement imaginable. A firm diagnosis of a society can be obtained with the examination of what it takes to be valuable and true, and how it reacts at seeing itself in the mirror of its own actions. In the case of the present society, all of these outer symptoms which can barely be broached in comedy are handled only in the alternative (publicly shunned) media as in this article (with extremely good artwork, btw) or instead displaced into fantastically surreal horror genres of all artistic media, and yet this is not seen for what it is, as a reflection in the mirror. That's what George Carlin was closer to nailing, and which Louis C.K. is not able to reach. He also showed up the mirror to The Thing that Should Not Be, but then he revealed himself to be a head on one of the monster's manifold Lovecraftian anatomy, and so is more of a surreal shock gone wrong than anything like moment of dignity in the face of tragedy, which Carlin seemed to sense humanity needed and couldn't muster.

He was right if did hold that view, as since his time it has gotten worse, not better, and in all areas of human existence, worldwide. The world is closing to its complete nullification, brought on by the heaviness of its heart on the Scales of Anubis.